An improved IMR model for BBHs on elliptical orbits

Abstract

Gravitational waveforms capturing binary's evolution through the early-inspiral phase play a critical role in extracting orbital features that nearly disappear during the late-inspiral and subsequent merger phase due to radiation reaction forces; for instance, the effect of orbital eccentricity. Phenomenological approaches that model compact binary mergers rely heavily on combining inputs from both analytical and numerical approaches to reduce the computational cost of generating templates for data analysis purposes. In a recent work, Chattaraj et al., Phys. Rev. D 106, 124008 (2022) arXiv:2204.02377(gr-qc), we demonstrated construction of a dominant (quadrupole) mode inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) model for binary black holes (BBHs) on elliptical orbits. The model was constructed in time-domain and is fully analytical. The current work is an attempt to improve this model by making a few important changes in our approach. The most significant of those involves identifying initial values of orbital parameters with which the inspiral part of the model is evolved. While the ingredients remain the same as in arXiv:2204.02377(gr-qc), resulting waveforms at each stage seem to have improved as a consequence of new considerations proposed here. The updated model is validated also against an independent waveform family resulting overlaps better than $\sim 96.5\%$ within the calibrated range of binary parameters. Further, we use the prescription of the dominant mode model presented here to provide an alternate (but equivalent) model for the (dominant) quadrupole mode and extend the same to a model including the effect of selected non-quadrupole modes. Finally, while this model assumes non-spinning components, we show that this could also be used for mildly spinning systems with component spins (anti-) aligned w.r.t the orbital angular momentum.